From having made this exact transition very abrubtly, I can say that agency designers have the design theory down much more than product designers. Learn the technical craft and you'll be fine. Apply to smaller startups (<20) and you'll know everything you need to know, plus the grit and work ethic.

Looking at that image specifically, decreasing the size of the X TO Y DAYS section labels would allow for more padding with the cells below them and would probably help a bit with the scanning problem.

Aesthetically pretty nice, but it’s so difficult to scan the text. The most dense areas of information being set in all-caps, condensed and with inverted text isn’t helping much. Huge step forward, regardless.

I can imagine that they were designed to mimic real life conversations. In a real conversation, you have body language to show that you just heard a message or understood it—like a head nod. Of course, read receipts lead toward some bad side effect behaviors, but I can see the intent. It’s a similar thing with Facebook’s “thumbs up” option when replying to someone’s message. It’s a simple indicator that you heard them, without having to reciprocate with a worded reply.

But, the problem is, that behavior can’t truly be replicated, since the “conversation” you’re participating in is forever ongoing. A real-life conversation has a beginning and an end, whereas a string of texts is quite less ephemeral.

Eh, he’s a student—can’t harp on him too badly. Besides, looks like it was just a fun visual exercise:

“In order to exercise our digital muscles, let’s redesign Google.com! This is limited strictly to a reskinning of the current site. Rebranding and/or adding any new functionalities to the home search page is completely optional. With there being already a minimal approach to the page, reimagining should require us to think hard, critically and outside of the box to create a quality solution.” via the prompt